8/09/2006

People do imagine the future. I was wrong



I recently saw a film called "Code 46" by Micheal Winterbottom with Samantha Morton (Nottingham lass) and Tim Robbins. It was a recently made utopia/dystopia film, so my claims in the previous post have been challenged.

The film had obviously been made on a small budget, so all the future imagining had been created by using minimal modern buildings in Shanghai for interior and exterior shots. There was also a clever use of desert locations to create a sense of a barren, devastated world. Although it wasn't a great film and the plot at times was impossible to follow or even find, its got some interesting ideas.

It's a description of a world where all sex is regulated to avoid genetically similar people having relations. Where insurance creates the divide between rich and poor. If you haven't got cover your no-one, everything you do in life is governed by whether you have a valid policy.
The basic plot is a love story between a fraud investigator and his target, a worker in an all powerful insurance company.

Great shots and ideas but overly self important and you lose interest in the characters towards the end. It was a shame because there were important messages about present global issues: environmental disaster, cloning, surveillance and the yawning gap between privileged first world populations and the stark poverty of the developing world. But the films meditative approach meant that some of these messages get lost.

But people are making future films. I stand corrected.

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home